The Rudolf Steiner Archive

25. Goethe’s “Fairy Tale” (Goethe’s Secret Esoteric Revelation)

[ 1 ] Yesterday I endeavored to show that what is to be presented here regarding Goethe’s innermost, most intimate opinions and views on the development of the human soul is not arbitrarily woven into his works—and particularly into the one that is of special concern to us— his fairy tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily—is not simply arbitrarily embedded in his works; rather, I have tried to show how the entire foundation upon which the explanation of this fairy tale and Goethe’s more intimate worldview is to be built can be derived from a historical examination of Goethe’s life and a historical tracing of his most significant creative impulses. Thus, I may well say that an attempt has been made to lay the groundwork for what is to be presented today in a freer treatment of the subject. When we allow that fairy tale, which was discussed yesterday, to come before our soul, it indeed appears to be entirely shrouded in mystery. And one might say that either we must assume that Goethe intended to imbue this fairy tale with much mystery—just as he did in the second part of his Faust, according to his own statements—or else that we might regard this fairy tale—which is quite out of the question—as a mere flight of fancy. Even if Goethe’s entire nature and way of thinking did not already rule out the latter, one would have to say that such an assumption is particularly precluded by the fact that Goethe placed this fairy tale at the end of his collection Conversations of German Emigrants. For it is essentially the same idea that we found yesterday to be characteristic of Goethe’s entire life, which also lives on in these “Conversations of German Emigrants,” written during the last decade of the eighteenth century. And from what immediately follows the “fairy tale,” we can once again discern the theme of this fairy tale.

[ 2 ] Here we are presented with the conversations of people who were forced to emigrate due to events in their native France, and who reflect in the most varied ways on the sorrowful experiences they have endured. There we see how the entire narrative culminates in showing what people—who have, in a certain sense, been torn from their circumstances and their surroundings—may go through in the solitude of their inner lives; what people in such a situation can gain through reflection, through contemplating their inner experiences, and through self-observation. We need only highlight a few examples that show us how Goethe focuses everything on how a soul, which becomes a warrior within itself, often asks itself—prompted by various circumstances—‘What kind of guilt have I accumulated upon myself? By what means have I hindered the paths to the soul’s development?’ How such a soul attempts to gain insight into itself. Here we first encounter that Italian singer, whose fate is meant to be laid out before us in this narrative, because through this fate we can be shown a human soul that, in a certain respect, must remain stuck on the surface of its view of the world. A human soul that, while attentively following what is happening around her—because she is compelled to do so by the circumstances of her life—is not yet mature enough to distinguish between what, in a certain sense, may be called a coincidence and the spiritual necessity of things. A soul that does not fully understand how the phenomena of life must be interconnected so that we may presuppose spirit and spiritual laws in our environment. This Italian singer behaved toward a man in such a way that he became seriously ill due to her repulsive manner, and that he is, in fact, dying because of her behavior. So she is summoned to his deathbed. She refuses to come to his deathbed. He must die without having seen her. Now, in the time following his death, various things take place that give a soul—one that would have to be characterized like that of the Italian singer—cause for reflection; give her such cause for reflection that she is not quite sure what to make of what is happening—which, after all, could be regarded as connected to her entire conduct, to the whole manner in which she had acted toward the deceased with regard to his fate. Then, after his death, something quite strange occurs. She hears all sorts of noises in her rooms, the furniture dances about, and she is even slapped by an unknown, invisible hand, so that, due to the strangeness and horror of these events, she finds herself asking at every moment: “Is the deceased somehow here, seeking to make his presence felt because I behaved so badly toward him?”

[ 3 ] The top of a cabinet bursts open, and, strangely enough, we learn that at the very moment the top of this cabinet burst open, a cabinet in France—one made by the same carpenter—went up in flames. Mind you, my friends, it would never occur to me—not even in my wildest dreams—to try to interpret these things in the light of a spiritual worldview, nor to suggest that Goethe intended to imply that such events contain something that might give rise to the assumption of, say, all manner of hidden spirits or the rumbling of the dead.

[ 4 ] Goethe simply wanted to show that there are certain souls who are so unenlightened that they do not know what to make of such peculiar events; who are not enlightened enough to say, “There is nothing to these things”; yet are not superstitious enough to say, “ ‘The dead are certainly stirring there,’ but rather those who, because they are undeveloped, can have only a vague sense of such things. We see how the soul fares in the external world, depending on its stage of development—something Goethe already demonstrates when he steers the narratives of Conversations of German Emigrants toward the “fairy tale.” He shows us how a person comes to be in the position of having to heal a lady of her sensuality, her passion. He takes the path of having her fast—guiding her, so to speak, through asceticism—in order to dampen her burning passion in this way. Again, a hint at all that a soul can go through in order to undergo development. Moving on—and now you will notice how Goethe, in fact, gradually elevates the subject. First, he portrays a soul that is still floundering in the vague in the Italian singer; he presents a more concrete example in the lady I just mentioned: It is indeed true that many people achieve a purification of their passions and a higher development of their soul through fasting. Here we are already moving more from the vague into the concrete, into reality, and this is certainly the case—that we are ascending into the reality of human soul development in the physical world—when we consider the third story that Goethe presents. There he shows how a person is at first somewhat unscrupulous—that is, stands at a lower stage of soul development—to the point where he says: “What belongs to my father also belongs to me.” The practical result of this is that he commits theft from his father’s cash register. In a sense, he grows precisely through this act. His soul ascends, and precisely by committing this wrongful act, he becomes a kind of moral center for the community of people that then gathers around him. Thus, even in his stories leading up to the “fairy tale,” Goethe shows us how he intends to depict the development of the soul—the ascent of the soul from certain lower stages to higher stages of knowledge and worldview.

[ 5 ] Now, as we saw yesterday, we are dealing entirely with soul forces, which are represented by the figures, the beings of the “fairy tale,” and with the interplay of soul forces, which is gradually to be purified into harmony—indeed, into a symphony of soul forces—as the soul ascends higher through the deeds performed by the figures and characters of the “fairy tale.” In what takes place in the “fairy tale,” we are dealing with will-o’-the-wisps that want to be ferried across the river by the ferryman from the other side to this side. At first they are filled with gold, but the ferryman does not want the gold as payment, because the river would be thrown into a wild tumult if pieces of gold fell into it. Instead, he demands the fruits of the earth: three onions, three artichokes, and three heads of cabbage. The will-o’-the-wisps have the ability to scatter gold around them, and we have seen how they encounter the serpent, whom they refer to as their “aunt” from the horizontal line, while they themselves are beings of the vertical line. By scattering gold, they give the serpent something that becomes fruitful and blessed within her, because the serpent, by combining the gold pieces with her own substance, becomes luminous from within. That which she was previously unable to see—and which yet has something to do with the mysteries of soul development—she is now able to illuminate within herself.

[ 6 ] When, more than twenty years ago, I tried in every possible way to gain access to this fairy tale, one thought in particular helped untangle the web of questions arising from the “fairy tale” when it became clear that I had to focus, above all, on the gold. Gold plays a wide variety of roles in this fairy tale. First, in the will-o’-the-wisps. The will-o’-the-wisps scatter it about; there it appears, in a certain sense, as something we might describe as not particularly beneficial in a certain respect. In the snake, the gold becomes a blessing. Then again in the golden king, who is made entirely of gold; then we find it once more on the walls of the hut where the old man with the lamp lives, and there the will-o’-the-wisps lick it off, making themselves fatter and more substantial by licking the gold from the walls. Thus, we encounter the gold several times, and at one point we are made keenly aware of the human soul force with which this gold is connected, as we are shown in the temple—which is first subterranean and then supraterrestrial—that the Golden King represents the Bringer of Wisdom. It is something we need not analyze or interpret, but rather about which we can say: Here Goethe himself says: The golden king signifies the giver, the bringer of wisdom. Gold must therefore have something to do with wisdom. It is the gold, in that it fills the essence of the golden king, that which makes him a wise being, that which enables him to endow the young man with the gift of knowledge

Recognize the Supreme!

[ 7 ] — so this passes from the golden king to the young man, and the young man is thereby enlivened. Gold is thus something that the Giver of Wisdom is able to instill within human beings. If the will-o’-the-wisps represent a soul force, then they must represent the soul force capable of absorbing wisdom, for they contain gold within themselves—the soul force that can also shake off wisdom. We learn how this wisdom can be stored from the fact that this symbol of wisdom—the gold—was stored on the walls for a long, long time before the will-o’-the-wisps licked it away. Since we know how well-founded it is to see soul forces in individual forms, we cannot help but say: The will-o’-the-wisps represent abstract intelligence, the pure power of reason, which is capable of acquiring a certain amount of wisdom—albeit through what is commonly called external science, speculation, or external experience. And now we also understand why gold—wisdom—plays such a role in the pure power of the intellect among the will-o’-the-wisps: The one who, with the intellect alone, takes in what constitutes knowledge, science, and wisdom does so, above all, to make it his own, so that he may in turn apply it personally. We can look into Goethe’s soul and recognize the way he approached things when we become aware of how he often, so to speak, congratulated himself on the fact that he had never found himself in the position of officially representing, as a teacher, the science to which he had so devotedly dedicated his time; that he was in a position to only then give something of his wisdom to the world when he was inwardly compelled to do so—not when he was called upon to dispense wisdom as one does when chosen for the teaching profession or as an abstract bearer of wisdom.

[ 8 ] In The Will-o'-the-Wisps, Goethe thus portrays human wisdom as having developed one-sidedly into intelligence, rational faculties, and it is a peculiarity that—however much it may be denied—abstract knowledge, mere intelligence, especially as it increasingly encroaches upon wisdom—and abstract intelligence can absorb vast amounts of wisdom—leads to the vanity of wanting to deal with everything through concepts. It is entirely in Goethe’s spirit when we realize why we still devise such wise thoughts, why we still think so cleverly: Abstract concepts and ideas that are not drawn from the depths, from the richness of life, are ultimately unsuitable for truly leading us into communion with the eternal mysteries of existence. Where we need something from the eternal mysteries of existence that will speak directly to our hearts, there we need something other than abstract ideas and concepts—products of mere intelligence. When we stand before that boundary that separates the two realms—the realm of the sensory-physical world, into which we feel transported, and the realm of the spiritual, the realm of the supersensible—when we find ourselves at this boundary, we are repelled by all abstract concepts and ideas; indeed, these abstract concepts and ideas are not even capable of making us understand, so to speak, what is closest to us, for they alienate us from what is closest to us. Just as far removed as the abstract thinker is from grasping even the most everyday things that surround him, so too is he incapable of contributing anything through his concepts and ideas to that stream before which we stand when we wish to cross over into the supernatural world. For concepts and ideas are of no use for this purpose. When one seeks to approach the very source of life, it rears up and does not let us approach. Therefore, the river has no use for the gold that the will-o’-the-wisps are able to offer, and we are told that none of the will-o’-the-wisps has ever stood or sat. They belong to the vertical line, whereas the Aunt Snake belongs to the horizontal line. This illustrates how human beings distance themselves from the ground through abstract concepts and ideas and cannot reach the ground of everyday life, which they are meant to understand. We see how vividly these abstract forms of the will-o’-the-wisps stand out. But are ideas and concepts—are philosophical discourses—under all circumstances what separates us from the true source of existence? No, they are not, if a person also has the capacity to live in such a way that he connects his own life forces with things. Not by venturing into the realm of abstract concepts and ideas, but by moving correctly within things, by becoming a spirit, just as Faust became one when he said:

Sublime Spirit, you gave me, gave me everything,
That I asked for. You did not in vain
Turn your face toward me in the fire.
You gave me the glorious natural world as my kingdom,
The power to feel it, to enjoy it. You do not
do you merely allow me to gaze coldly as a visitor,
but grant me to look into its deep bosom,
as into the bosom of a friend.
You lead the procession of the living
past me, and teach me to recognize my brothers
in the silent thicket, in air and water.

[ 9 ] Where a person truly forms an inner communion with the beings of nature—where he does not sever himself from them with all the powers of his soul—there the very concepts that alienate the “abstract thinker” from the world serve him to delve ever deeper and deeper into existence. We must not, so to speak, turn the matter on its head and say: because abstract concepts and ideas remove the abstract thinker from the true essence of things, concepts and ideas are, in general, worthless. No, on the contrary, where they fall into that power of the soul that rises up and lives in a certain communion in and with things—in such a power of the soul, they are at the same time radiant. Thus, the gold—which in the will-o’-the-wisps is, in a certain sense, devoid of blessing—becomes such a blessing, the light within the serpent that dwells in the crevices, the one with the horizontal line that clings to the earth. When a person remains rooted to the earth, when they love all things, immerse themselves in them, when they—to use the frowned-upon word—“mystically” delve into them, then clear ideas serve to guide them through these things. That is why you can also see—I don’t know how many of you have had such an experience, but it can be had—that philosophies presented in an academic manner sometimes seem cold and sober, but that the same ideas, when they come to us from simple, nature-loving people who live outdoors as herb gatherers, root gatherers, or the like — and who, as a rule, take a keen interest in the mysteries of existence —, what lofty ideas such people, mystically united with nature, sometimes arrive at. We shall see how, in these people of nature who enter into communion with things, ideas become luminous that are worthless, sober, and cold among the abstract thinkers. Thus we are led away from the will-o’-the-wisps that abstract intelligence presents to us, toward that power of the soul which is deeply rooted within us and which has the mystical urge to, so to speak, immerse itself in all things. This is depicted for us quite vividly and tangibly in the way the serpent moves through the crevices: Indeed, even if a person does not enlighten themselves through concepts or live in abstract ideas, they come close to the heart of things, just as the snake approaches an underground temple, where—because it cannot see—it first perceives certain forms only by touch, forms it will only later behold in the light. If a person has even a sense of the mysterious workings of the forces of nature, they come to the heart of nature; they can experience something of what lives out there around us in the things of the world. We see this in the snake, which thus shows us how it is a representative of those soul forces in human beings that can, under certain circumstances, live even without ideas—though in such cases they are not illuminated by the light of knowledge—yet which lovingly immerse themselves in things, arriving at a certain grasp of the world’s mysteries. When balance is then achieved through ideas and concepts immersing themselves in these mystical soul forces of ours, a state arises in which the person who is lovingly attuned to things also finds that which he previously could only grope for from the sources of existence; he can also illuminate it with his own inner light—indeed, he is led even deeper into it.

[ 10 ] You may recall a meaningful quote from Goethe, in which he says:

If the eye were not like the sun,
How could we see the light?
If God’s own power did not live within us,
How could the divine delight us?

[ 11 ] Goethe thus points out immediately that we must turn our eyes toward the light that is to illuminate the mysteries of nature, so that it may in turn reflect back, as it were, the mysteries of nature within itself. Therefore, we must take into ourselves the preparation for knowledge, just as the serpent takes in gold; then we penetrate into what otherwise remains dark, just as a person, when he inwardly preserves his sense and open heart for the spiritual, sees these insights more clearly—for only then can he also perceive the spiritual in his surroundings.

[ 12 ] And so the serpent enters the underground temple. Here Goethe hints to us in a wondrous way that there are underground places for the human soul. One can only characterize such things, as presented by Goethe, by delving a little more deeply into the remarkable workings of the human soul as it develops. One can then sense how our soul—even before it is capable of explaining the things of the world externally, of demonstrating everywhere the divine life and weaving of the Spirit in all things—even before it is capable of doing so, possesses an inner certainty: Yes, there is such a divine source; there is a supersensible realm behind all the sensible. It can experience within itself the certainty of this transcendent realm and yet be unable to perceive this transcendent realm shining throughout the entire universe. Oh, it is a lofty goal to perceive the Spirit in its form—how it is the creative source of everything that surrounds us in the great world, how everything that surrounds us in the great world springs forth from the Spirit. To do this, a person must first develop the highest powers of the soul within themselves.

[ 13 ] The supernatural, which lies hidden within ordinary human consciousness as the higher self, must first be awakened by the individual in order to ascend to a higher stage of spiritual development. One can sense that such a thing exists. But then one also arrives at another insight: If a person has any sense at all of reality, of true existence, they must say to themselves: I can only reach my ultimate goal if I see how everything is lived through and interwoven by the spirit—how spirit is in all things. But I myself—as I stand in the world with my physical body—have, as it were, crystallized out of, been born out of the Spirit—I was born out of it without having any part in it, something I can ultimately attain again through the highest knowledge. In a mysterious way, unknown even to myself, I have come over from this realm of the supersensible, into which I wish to re-enter through my knowledge. In this we have the “other shore” spoken of in the “fairy tale”—the land beyond the river where the beautiful lily dwells, which represents the highest worldview and outlook on life, which represents the power of the soul to which human beings can develop themselves. From there comes the mysterious being, the ferryman, who brings the will-o’-the-wisps across from the other shore. Through real forces, human beings are brought into this world, where they stand as if surrounded by darkness—hence the mysterious words spoken by the ferryman, who brings us from the supersensible world to the land on this side of the river, who is permitted only to bring beings across, but not to take anyone back. Human beings cannot return to where they came from in the same way they arrived—through birth. Other paths must be taken.

[ 14 ] Then the will-o'-the-wisps ask how they can enter the realm of the beautiful lily—that is, how a single soul force can immerse itself in the harmony of soul forces in such a way that it rises to the Highest. Then the serpent suggests two means: One is that which can be provided by the serpent itself, if they allow themselves to be led by it at noon, when the sun shines at its highest. The will-o’-the-wisps say: That is a time when we do not like to travel. Yes, why? It simply lies entirely beyond the realm of the abstract thinker, who wishes to live only in abstract ideas and concepts, who seeks to achieve everything solely through combinations and conclusions—to reach the other side in the way represented by the serpent, through mystical devotion to things, through the search for mystical communion with things. Nor can this mystical communion always be attained. I recall that a great mystic of the Alexandrian school confessed in his old age that he had experienced only a few times in his life that great moment when the soul feels ready to immerse itself so deeply that the spirit of the Infinite awakens and that mystical moment arrives when God is experienced within the human breast. These are midday moments, when the sun of life is at its zenith, in which such a thing can be experienced; and for those who always want to have their abstract ideas at the ready—so that they can say, “Whoever has true thoughts must be led to the Highest”—for them, such midday hours of life, which must be regarded as a grace of earthly existence, are not a time to which they wish to journey. For such abstract thinkers, the moment to solve the world’s riddles must be available at all times. Then the serpent draws their attention to another way they can cross over—namely, over the shadow of the giant, that strange being who can do nothing on his own, cannot bear the slightest weight, not even a bundle of rice on his shoulder. At twilight, when semi-darkness spreads, when the giant casts his shadow across the river that separates the sensible from the supersensible, then people can cross over as well. What kind of strange being is this giant? If we wish to understand this giant, we must bear in mind that Goethe was well aware of those soul forces that lie, so to speak, beneath the threshold of consciousness—forces that in the normal human being emerge only in dreams, but which, speaking in the sense of spiritual science, belong to the subordinate clairvoyant powers that are not attained through the development of the soul, but rather manifest particularly in primitive souls through premonitions, second sight, and all that is connected with a soul that has not yet advanced very far—from which springs a certain uncontrollable and uncontrolled clairvoyance.

[ 15 ] Through such clairvoyant powers—it cannot be denied—human beings gain certain intuitions about the supersensible world, and many people today still prefer to approach the supersensible world through such intuitions or through spiritualistic phantoms rather than through development, through the true elevation of the soul into the realm of the supersensible. What belongs to the realm of the subconscious, to the realm of the soul—which is not illuminated by what one might call clear reason, the light of insight, or self-control, and which, like dreamlike knowledge, also exists in life—is represented to us in this giant. In fact, one cannot truly perceive through this subconscious, for it is very weak compared to true knowledge—something that cannot be controlled anywhere, something one cannot rely on, so to speak.

[ 16 ] If one were to personify this subconscious, one could not do so better than by depicting a person who is incapable of bearing even the slightest weight. Through such subconscious insight—if one seeks to develop it on its own—a person is unable to recognize, even in the slightest controlled way, what stands on a secure foundation or what carries weight for our worldview. Yet the shadow of this subconscious plays a major role in cultural life as a whole. Oh, this is evident throughout everything—and it takes only one word to be spoken to characterize the shadow that, for many human souls, actually provides a satisfying bridge into the realm of the supersensible: the word “superstition.” If countless people did not have this superstition—which is the shadow of the subconscious, which prefers not to operate in the light of clear ideas but rather in the twilight— they would have no inkling of the supersensible world; and for countless people today, superstition is still the shadow of the subconscious that leads them, in the twilight hours of soul life, into the realm of the supersensible. One need not even enumerate the various manifestations of the superstitious nature in cultural history; one need only consider how people come, for example, to theosophy or spiritual science, which seek to convey to us something of the supersensible world—something that only those who are willing to exert great effort to elevate their souls can comprehend. We want to ascend to the higher beings. But many take the easy way out; they want the spirits to descend to us instead of us rising to them. They are happy when a medium is found somewhere who, from the realm of the subconscious, bears witness to the existence of the supernatural world. Not only inferior spirits pay homage to what flourishes so abundantly as “spiritism,” but even scholars who refuse to admit that the soul can be raised to the spiritual heights through its own development. It is not certain that the phenomena in question are not true, but distinguishing between truth and error is extremely difficult, and only the initiate is capable of exercising scientific scrutiny.

[ 17 ] Goethe wishes to draw attention to this shadow of the subconscious, to this vast realm that eludes wise self-knowledge and self-control, to this power of the soul. But he does not point it out like a polemicist—Goethe was never a polemicist—rather, he is aware that every spiritual force has its significance at its own level, even if it must be suppressed at another level; that is why he does not say: “Beware of the giant,” but rather he even finds it useful here to have the snake give the will-o’-the-wisps the advice that they should let themselves be led out of the giant’s shadow into the twilight. Strangely enough, this advice is repeated today when scholars do not want to take the bait of theosophy. Then well-meaning people come along and say: Let a spiritualist séance convince you of a supersensory world; then you will be guided into it in a plausible way. But superstition plays a major role precisely in drawing attention to and directing the human senses toward the supersensory world, and one must be clear that Goethe—who sought to portray the entire realm of the soul’s powers as if in a symphonic harmony—truly believed that this superstition, when it does not degenerate into wild superstition, has its good reason in the soul’s powers, which do not all immediately present themselves through sober, clear concepts, but first say to themselves: We can penetrate deeply, deeply into the mysteries of things—but we would rather, at first, content ourselves with intuitions of their mysteries. First to sense these mysteries, not to find our way into them immediately with sharp contours! This intuitive approach to things is very important, since it is meant to play a part in the entire life and weaving of our soul’s development.

[ 18 ] Goethe wanted to show that what was so clearly expressed to him in the external world found a higher form of expression in the powers of the soul. I do not wish to point out that even if Goethe had written no poems, no plays, no Wilhelm Meister, no Werther, he would still have been a luminous figure for all time through his scientific discoveries. That, in addition to his otherwise better-known scientific discoveries, he found a certain law—one that was not devised or speculated by him, but which, as we shall see, is deeply rooted in things themselves, like a leitmotif in all natural processes, and which one might call the law of balance, even in all external natural phenomena. That nature has a certain measure of development for every being, which it can modify in one direction or another, thereby giving rise to variety and diversity. Look at the giraffe! Nature has applied a certain measure of active forces to the giraffe’s development, devoting more energy to the formation of the forebody and the neck—hence the hindquarters have atrophied! Look at the mole! Here, nature directs all its forces toward the body, which is why the little feet remain stunted. Goethe showed how one can understand the difference in form between a dromedary and a lion, and how different organs emerge as a result of uniform measures being applied in one direction in one instance and in the opposite direction in another. We see how a typical form manifests itself in diversity: in one instance, the lower jaw develops teeth; in another, the lower jaw remains toothless and horns develop instead. When Goethe articulated this law, it was naturally regarded as the utterance of a poet who understood nothing of the natural sciences—a layman, a dilettante. But in the French Academy in 1830, a French naturalist, in his dispute with Cuvier, drew attention to this law under the name “balancement des organes.” The future will yet have much to say about this “balancement des organes,” because it delves deeply into the formal characteristics of the various beings. Goethe also applied this law to spiritual life. He recognized that there is something similar in the soul as well—something that, at a higher level within the individual soul forces, gives expression to the particular—so that he says: There are human beings who embody the specific quality represented by will-o’-the-wisps. In life itself, they represent will-o’-the-wisps, false prophets who cannot help but pass on to others what they have learned and pour out their gold. Other human beings, however, can infuse nature with a mystical light, like the snakes that submerge themselves in nature. In short, Goethe wanted to show how, in ordinary everyday life in the outer world, souls manifest themselves in such a way that they give rise to one-sided forces. Thus, the way in which a human being can ascend to a higher level of knowledge is by embodying within themselves the archetype of the human soul—a balance, a proper interplay of all soul forces—in which intuition is linked to the most sober of soul forces. Not as superstition already does, which loses itself entirely in intuition and allows the power of intelligence to be subjugated by the intuition of the nature of things.

[ 19 ] While Goethe depicts, on the one hand, how a person can become one-sided, he also shows how, if a person wishes to attain higher insights, he must strive toward that summit symbolized by the beautiful lily: inner harmonious balance and the interplay of the individual powers of the soul.

[ 20 ] Now we know that the serpent, after having, so to speak, received the inner light within itself, enters the subterranean temple. Now it can discern that there are those spiritual worlds that approach human beings, that must inspire them, and that can impart the forces which the human soul must properly possess within itself if it wishes to ascend to a higher existence. There are certain forces in the human soul that it must possess if it wishes to ascend to the higher level. But if a person seeks to attain this higher level without having found the right path at the right time through the inspiration of these world powers—if they seek to grasp, while still immature, the highest that can be attained in knowledge and worldview—then this worldview becomes something that can kill, confuse, and paralyze the soul. Therefore, the young man who wishes to unite with the lily before he is ripe will first be paralyzed, indeed killed. In other words, Goethe vividly expressed what he once put into a brief aphorism:

Anything that frees our spirit without giving us control over ourselves is destructive.

[ 21 ] There is a high stage of human development through which the human soul can become one with the fruits of all knowledge. It lies before us like a distant prospect. Our striving must be directed toward ripening ourselves, toward shaping ourselves in such a way that we are in the right state of mind, in the right inner disposition, so that we do not receive the highest truth while still immature. Thus, the young man is first put to death and must first be guided through the endowment of the soul forces represented by the kings. Before he can unite with the beautiful lily, the serpent leads him to the three kings. Meaningful conversations surround these kings like mysteries. The golden king is that supersensory power which can be kindled in our soul, which bestows wisdom in the right way, so that the power of wisdom aligns harmoniously with the other soul forces. The silver king represents piety. And for Goethe, piety means something quite different from its ordinary meaning.

[ 22 ] Anyone familiar with Goethe knows that, for him, the worship of beauty and art were intimately connected with religious feeling; hence, beauty is that which always inspires him with piety, so that for him, the King of Wisdom is represented by gold. The king endowed with the power of the soul that gives rise to religion through beauty is the silver king. But that which is meant to invigorate our impulses of will, that which seeks to permeate us in the ordered life of the soul as a force of will, is represented by the bronze king.

[ 23 ] Our soul forces must be brought under our complete control so that we can distinguish between them, so that we may view the world wisely in the proper way and so that our emotions do not play tricks on us. So that the life of feeling is not overwhelmed by the life of wisdom, and the life of wisdom, in turn, is not overwhelmed by the life of the will—and vice versa—but rather that the three soul forces appear separately and distinctly in the higher life of the soul. As for the fourth king, it must be said: Every human being possesses wisdom, piety, and willpower within themselves, but in such a way that gold, silver, and dross are chaotically intermingled. Then a higher stage of the soul’s development begins when this chaotic intermingling of the soul forces ceases, and the person is not driven at one moment by an impulse of the will, at another moment by emotions, and at yet another moment guided solely by wisdom. No, when the non-chaotic is blended—as happens under the fourth king—when a person clearly distinguishes within himself the realm of the soul force imbued with wisdom, that of the sense of beauty, that of the religious mood, and that which is imbued with the good will toward virtue, so that he masters this realm rather than being driven by it, then he will reach that point where one may say: The time has come; I must undertake something else. A soul that is led unprepared into the realm of wisdom, beauty, and strength would scarcely perceive any of these things.

[ 24 ] The man with the lamp represents a spiritual power that, in a certain sense, prepares people for wisdom, beauty, and strength. The peculiarity of this lamp is that it can shine only where another light already exists. What, then, is this light that emanates from the old man’s lamp? The same light—the light of a religious worldview, which must precede true wisdom—that radiates from our hearts, even when we have not yet penetrated to the heart of things. This is a light that can shine only where another light already exists: religions can generate faith only where they arise through this or that preparation, or where they are adapted to what people feel under the influence of a particular climate, specific cultural epochs, and so on. Thus, the serpent—which seeks to penetrate to wisdom, piety, and strength through purely inner mystical soul power alone—must encounter, before the kings, the soul forces, the light of faith that leads the soul to higher knowledge and prepares it. Thus Goethe shows how the right time must come. How the soul must first be guided by the light of faith, and how, once the soul has prepared itself through this guidance, it can ascend into an age in which it has experienced many things. [How it] can come to a direct grasp of the soul’s power, both in its distinctness and in its harmonious interplay. It is shown how human beings here in the physical world, on this side of the river, can prepare themselves. How, on the other side, if a person connects immaturely with the pinnacles of human soul life, they suffer damage, so to speak, in their soul and are ruined.

[ 25 ] And now the strange figure of the old man’s wife with the lamp. This woman, who is portrayed to us in an all-too-human way, who is chosen by the will-o’-the-wisps to pay with the fruits of the earth—she represents primitive human nature, which cannot rise to the level of knowledge, but, united with the man with the lamp, with the light, she can believe. What, then, is the light of faith capable of? Turning stones into gold, wood into silver, dead animals into gemstones. All of this is illustrated by the fact that the pug, which ate the gold that the will-o’-the-wisps had shaken off, is transformed into gemstones by the old man’s lamp. Here the power of faith is demonstrated—this truly wondrous power of faith, this advance toward higher knowledge. Or how it is capable of revealing all things to us in such a way that they truly present their divine aspects in a certain manner. That even before we have attained the supersensible within them through knowledge, they reveal what is within them. The lifeless stones reveal: whatever has been endowed with wisdom is transformed into gold by the light of this lamp. That is to say, faith is capable of already sensing in things what wisdom later recognizes in them in full light—and how all things are not as they appear to us in the sensory world, but rather that they possess a deeper aspect. This is symbolically indicated by how the light of faith in the old man’s lamp transforms all things. When a person remains true to his healthy nature—and cannot attain science or knowledge—he actually possesses, deep down, something within himself that is much more closely connected to the mysterious forces that lie on the threshold of the supersensible. This stands in contrast to those who have turned to abstract science and all too easily become doubters and skeptics. They lose their footing, becoming uncertain and nervous in the face of all knowledge. How secure is the original, primitive nature, as represented by this old woman, who is so deeply connected to nature—she can offer what the will-o’-the-wisps cannot. Such people possess a primal sense through which they are aware of the connections to the infinite, the divine—that which lives and weaves throughout all of nature as the supernatural. That is why, when learned people come with their doubts, many such primal people offer that pitying smile, which seems to say: No matter how clever you may be, no matter how much you may know about nature through your scholarship, we know what you do not know—certain knowledge that unites us with that from which we ourselves originate. The woman can provide what the will-o’-the-wisps cannot.

[ 26 ] Human beings must attain more than just emotional certainty. They are connected to the supersensible realm, as depicted by the temple’s interaction with the kings, where there is not only an inner, mystical sense of security, but where human beings must ascend so that they may truly be introduced into the realm of the supersensible and witness the spiritual life and its workings. The temple must be raised from the subterranean to the surface. The temple of knowledge must itself rise above the boundary line, above the river that flows between the supersensible and the sensible worlds. And it is conceivable that a soul, having worked so diligently upon itself and ascended the stages of development, might in a certain sense hold those sacred midday moments of life in its hands, enabling it to pass through them into the spiritual world and back into the sensible world. That it can draw attention, when a phenomenon of external nature is revealed, to how the Divine-Spiritual reigns, and can point back to the pure Divine-Spiritual that resides in the supersensible realm—so that the goal is achieved where not only select, particularly favored spirits can cross the river. This is to be achieved through spiritual science in modern culture. Goethe is a prophet of theosophy in his “Fairy Tale,” in that he shows that it is not only the privileged mystical souls, who possess innate mysticism, who experience midday moments in life when, in the bright sunshine of life, they can cross the river and find the realm of the supersensible, but that there is a development of the soul that everyone can undergo. Every soul, by its very nature—albeit with effort and self-denial—can journey back and forth, from and to the supersensible realm, once the mystery of faith has been realized.

“How many secrets do you know?” — “Three,” replied the old man. “Which is the most important?” asked the Silver King. “The obvious one,” replied the old man.

[ 27 ] This figure of speech [the revealed secret] appears frequently in Goethe’s work because, like all true mystics, Goethe held the view that there is nothing spiritual that is not experienced externally, materially, in some way, and that connections between the material and the spiritual can be found everywhere. One need only find the right point, the right place in the universe, where the spiritual expresses itself externally, physiognomically. The mystery revealed! It is not so much a matter of seeking the spiritual through stealthy and roundabout paths, but rather of connecting with things, like the serpent. And through communion with the material world, one also finds a path to the spiritual. The revealed secret is the one that can be found everywhere and requires only a certain maturity of the soul. The three secrets are none other than these: how wisdom, beauty, piety, and virtue should live within us, not separately. Characteristically, a fourth is necessary for this—something the old man cannot know. But he can know this much: he can say that the time has come! What does the serpent whisper in the old man’s ear? That she is ready to sacrifice herself, that she is ready to sacrifice her own body, just to build a bridge across the river from what emerges from her.

[ 28 ] The great mystery of the sacrifice of the lower soul forces, which are meant only to be the path to the higher Self: I want to sacrifice everything that is connected to the lower entities of nature—everything I have sought in obedience to the laws of the world—I want to sacrifice myself. Whoever lacks this—this dying and becoming—remains only a gloomy guest on the dark earth.

[ 29 ] First, a person must pass through everything that leads him inward—through natural phenomena and facts of nature—and then offer up what he has thus gained and experienced, along with his lower self as a sensual being, in order to ascend.

[ 30 ] Jakob Böhme expressed this mystery beautifully:

Whoever does not die before he dies,
will perish when he dies.

[ 31 ] Whoever enters the supernatural world through the gate of death without having killed the lower soul forces—without having died within to the lower self before passing through the physical gate of death—would not be preparing himself in this incarnation to see the true spiritual being before death!

[ 32 ] The soul protects itself from ruin in the lower self when it becomes like the serpent, which does not merely remain in the crevices but sacrifices itself—that is to say: Within us is a power of the soul that can unite with all beings of nature. This power must be present, but it must first be sacrificed for the sake of higher knowledge—namely, that everything which manifests as lower egoism and lower self-interest, which are initially necessary for attaining higher freedom, must die away. Therefore, that which first led us into the realm of this world becomes the very path to the hereafter. We ascend into the supersensible world only through what we ourselves have sacrificed. The will-o’-the-wisps are capable only of unlocking the gate. They hold the keys. Science holds the keys, just as Mephisto holds the keys to the realm of the mothers; he can unlock the gate, but he cannot lead us into the true mysteries. We can recognize the value of the sciences and appreciate the intelligent, abstract aspects of human life, for they lead us to the gate. But then the higher powers of the soul must come into play if we are to be admitted into the temple. Thus we see how these will-o’-the-wisps indeed fulfill their role to the end, and how Goethe, in the composition of his fairy-tale poetry, captures the essence of the soul’s powers down to the finest details. The “fairy tale” is such that, with this kind of explanation, every word, every sentence is evidence that a deeper meaning is woven into the tale. Through the effect of the lamp, the old man’s house is lined with gold. What remains of religion, of the various religions? Tradition!

[ 33 ] Let’s try to visualize this concretely within our cultural process. Let’s go to our libraries and search through the historical works on this or that religion. How much of that gold is stored there, how much has been illuminated by the light of the lamp—and how the abstract thinkers arrive, licking up the gold, gleaning the history of religions from the books and turning old books into new ones. Even where wisdom becomes history, stored away in libraries—the will-o’-the-wisps can feed on it; they even walk around, brimming with scholarship, with what originally comes from these sources. The pug, the creature of nature, the uneducated one, fares worse; it dies from this wisdom and must first be revived. First, it is transformed into gemstones by the light of the lamp and can then be transformed from gemstone through contact with the lily. The lily can revive everything that has passed through death, that has gone through it—what has not experienced this, this dying and becoming—must have become a radiant guest on this earth. Whoever wishes to endure the touch of the lily must have passed through the death of the lower self.

[ 34 ] Thus, the young man does not become ready to come into contact with the beautiful lily until after he has first been killed. He can only enter the Temple of Wisdom after the serpent has sacrificed itself. Once all this has taken place, the young man can then be led to the Temple. Once the sacrifice is complete, the soul is led upward from its subterranean existence to the realization that everything is permeated and interwoven by the Spirit; then the temple is guided from below to above, and the human being is endowed with whatever the individual soul forces can bestow upon him. Wisdom gives him what is expressed in the golden king’s saying:

Recognize the Supreme.

[ 35 ] The symbol is the oak wreath. The Silver King hands him the scepter and says:

Feed the sheep

[ 36 ] as a sign that he has been endowed with the power of piety. The bronze king hands him a sword and a shield and says to him:

The sword in the left hand, the right hand free!

[ 37 ] True virtue is not aggressive in its approach, but it stands strong and firm on its own two feet; and when it comes to human dignity and human destiny, it is ready to defend them and to act in the world with love for humanity and through wholesome human deeds. Now the young man unites with the beautiful lily. The individual powers of the soul are illuminated by true love. But the soul can only feel this once it has transcended ordinary love, once it is absorbed in love for the spiritual. Wisdom, beauty, piety, and virtue—they develop and foster the soul’s growth. Love must not only grow; it enlivens, shapes, and harmonizes everything. It lifts the soul up a step. There we then see how the human being, as he ascends, as he finds himself in that temple where he can experience insights, comes to see—but now with holy awe—how the small temple within the great temple reveals the Highest, the Mystery of Mysteries, humanity itself—how it passes over as a spiritual being from the spiritual world to the ferryman’s hut, which brings beings from the world beyond into this world—where humanity, as a small world, as a little temple, is transferred into the greater temple, so beautifully illustrating that when the soul ascends to the levels of higher insight, it then attains through wisdom, piety, and virtue. What Goethe so beautifully perceived as the Spinozist love of God—the development of the highest powers of the soul—leads to the riddles, the mysteries of the world; but as the highest of all mysteries, which we in turn perceive as a small temple within the great one: the mystery of human beings themselves and their connection to divine being. The giant comes last, gropes his way around, and then becomes the hour hand of time. Our knowledge becomes spiritual; as we ascend in our soul life, we shed what, in terms of external materialism, is the awareness of those laws that operate mechanically. [The giant] essentially stands for the subconscious, for everything that comes from the forces of the soul that also operate in the subconscious. This may remain only in one aspect when we look up at what is the outermost limit for our inner life—how the times follow one another, what the outer rhythm of time is. This has its ultimate justification; here, purely mechanical knowledge has its justification. One might say: When this idea of the giant—who ultimately becomes the world’s hour hand—came to Goethe, he may have had in mind all the superstitions that have been fostered by numerology and the various spatial formations—things that have remained merely as superstitious shadows of a greater insight from the ancient times of the old worldviews. But one thing remains valid: the creation of a kind of chronometer for the processes that surround human beings, based on what has been recognized.

[ 38 ] Thus, in a certain sense, we find everything that Goethe perceived as necessary for the development of the powers of the soul translated into vivid images. If you wish to ascend to the highest level, then you must develop the powers of the soul in a way that can only be expressed symbolically through rich, meaningful images. Then you must come close to what Goethe intended to say when you try to gain an understanding of these images from within Goethe’s entire worldview. But you must be aware that what is contained in the fairy tale is infinitely richer than I have described, and that all of this is really only a suggestion as to how one should seek and feel one’s way through Goethe’s fairy tales. But perhaps it is possible to grasp the sense of the inner richness, the inner grandeur, and the immeasurable creative power from which Goethe drew his inspiration. How right he is when he says that the true, the beautiful, and the truly artistic can and must be nothing other than an embodiment of the universal truth that permeates the world and is recognizable to human beings. And that was also the conviction that lived within Goethe, the very conviction that led him himself from stage to stage in his restless striving; that is what draws us, so to speak, to Goethe. Goethe is one of those minds whose influence is comparable only to that of the very greatest.

[ 39 ] Once in a lifetime, you read a work by Goethe. You think you’ve understood it. Five years later, you read it again and realize: I didn’t understand it at all back then; I only understand it now. Then, five years later, you read it again, and you realize just how much you’ve discovered—things you couldn’t see before because you weren’t mature enough. Only now, after you yourself have experienced so much, only now can you understand the work. After five years, you read it again, and then you may be fortunate enough to say to yourself: Back then, you didn’t understand it yet; you must—and can—calmly wait until you become mature and even more mature, so that you may be fully satisfied as you grow ever deeper into it. It is only the case with the most distinguished minds in the development of humanity that one has this feeling. Such people must be regarded as leaders of human culture. One gains a sense of the infinity of the content of their soul by being able to penetrate ever deeper into it. Then one counts them among those minds about whom we, summing up today’s reflection, can say:

Like stars they shine
in the sky of eternal being
the spirits sent by God.
May all human souls
in the realm of earthly existence
be able to behold the light of their flames!